“An extraordinary collection of extraordinary lives lived out in extraordinary circumstances, “Let Me Tell You My Story” is a compelling read and one that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself is finished and set back upon the shelf. A unique and outstanding contribution to our contemporary national discussion over refugees and immigration, “Let Me Tell You My Story” should be a part of every community and academic library collection in the country.”

Mary Cowper
Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

That review explains, in part, why my blog has been silent for a while. If I haven’t said it before, I’ll repeat that it’s never for lack of things to share that I slip off the blog map. It’s for lack of bandwidth. Otherwise, I have no excuses.

Instead of shuttering closed my blog completely (which I’ve been tempted to do because … bandwidth and I love remaining connecting with my readers), I’m back here updating. Who could use a dose of meaningful, inspiring news?

Their Story is Our Story, (TSOS), the refugee nonprofit I’ve been involved in from its inception in the winter of 2016, has published a handsome and life-changing volume. I’m convinced every person on earth should read it.

You, in fact, should read it. And then you should review it. To expedite that, here’s a link to a free e-review copy:

It is a huge honor for me to now serve as the Executive Director of TSOS’ quickly growing community of visionaries and grit & grip doers. And I am, of course, in awe of our many refugee friends, some of whom you will meet in this book, who continue to share their stories and show us the way to the best in humanity. This volume is a tribute to them.

And I take no personal credit for its existence. Special thanks go to our Editor in Chief, the unstoppable Twila Bird, who worked superhuman hours to oversee the creation and publication of this gorgeous collection in record time; to Kate Farrell of Familius Publishing, who has been a joy and strength to work with; to Christopher Robbins, Familius CEO, who’s publicly stated that this is the most “important book” he has ever published in his 25+ year publishing career; Trisha Leimer, TSOS Chair and Founder who has driven our team with wisdom and through challenging personal transition (last spring, she and her husband Axel accepted a request to oversee for three years and without pay 120+ volunteers for their faith in the Berlin, Germany region); and the entire TSOS family, made up of art, photography, video, tech, writing, travel, social media, refugee liaison, fundraising, networking, translation, research, PR, live events and documenting teams.

Their efforts have, among other significant service, produced Let Me Tell You My Story, a heavy, visually stunning, and substantial work. It is in no way a comprehensive collection of the interviewing and compiling work our growing TSOS team has done over these last two years. Rather, it is a cross section of both our refugee and volunteer stories, pointing subtly to the way host culture natives learn from newcomers like refugees, and how the intersection of these seemingly dissimilar lives blesses and benefits everyone.

Let Me Tell You My Story ranks now among the Top 25 Amazon titles for Humanitarian Law right next to the likes of Malala and Nicolas Kristof. We’ve learned it is already being used as a textbook in a university seminar on global migration, fulfilling our vision (and the suggestion of the above Midwest Book Review) that Let Me Tell You My Story should have a place in every academic, political, local library’s and family’s book shelves.

A final plus: a full 40% of Let Me Tell You My Story’s proceeds (after covering printing, shipping and distribution costs) return to TSOS to help our 100% volunteer organization collect and tell the stories of refugees, of their friends made along the route, and of the hosts who welcome them into their new places of safety.

But our storytelling is not an end in itself. It serves the specific end goal of partnering alongside organizations — local to international — to facilitate the integration of newcomers in host communities.

No refugee is really safe until she or he is integrated in a new home. And integration takes every last one of us. Whether you interact with or even know your newcomer neighbors or not, their story is weaving into your story. Our stories are connected. The deeper you follow those stories, the more unified you realize we all actually are.

I told my German students yesterday that, sorry, I’d be taking a two week break from teaching. Why? My son is entering university, I explained, and I am flying with him to the USA to get him settled in an apartment, buy him his textbooks, all the normal––

I stopped on “normal”. With “university” my voice had caught, and then it had faded at “flying.” By “apartment” I was whispering. They are trigger words, hard for refugees to hear.

No Private Homes, No Travel Over Borders, No Further Education

A few months ago, I’d have tra-la-laed right through that sentence, never thinking of those words as extraordinary — even painfully extraordinary for some. That is because several months ago I hadn’t known the world of Middle Eastern refugees who had fled bombed-out lives to trudge weeks or months westward where they would have to survive months on end in tents, shared facilities, or, as with my current students, in small camping caravans.

Some of my students, due to perpetual political unrest, resultant poverty, or the terror waged by extremist groups, have only limited education, and a few have never learned to read or write. Some have advanced university degrees, which they are now unable to use, and yearn to enter the work force or German university. That might still be years off.

For them and for now, the closest thing to furthering their education is this class I offer a couple of mornings a week in a former pub on the other side of the chain link fence from their dusty camp. A far cry from university, and leagues from Ivy League, but a small, cool oasis of hope.

This is why the mere mention of apartments (or hopping on planes, or enrolling in university) makes them sometimes sigh or even wince with longing. And it makes me scramble for other points of connection.

Separation is Where We Connect

Where do we connect? Every last refugee I have known has had to leave family members behind. Separation is our point of connection. So I explained in that conversation yesterday that this son with whom I’m flying to the States, I had not seen for two years straight.

Flying with him to England

Eyes widened.

And, I explained: I have only spoken with him via Skype four brief moments in those two years. We exchange emails once a week, yes, but we’ve had no phone calls. I have missed him. Deeply.

They asked where he has been.

In another country. In … England. (I hesitated before that trigger word.)

England. Wince.

England is some refugees’ Shangri-la. At least that’s the rumor. They talk about how much easier it is supposed to be there compared to here in Germany. This student from Kabul had an uncle who fled to Manchester in the ‘80s. He has residency, a real home, and his children got an education! This woman from Damascus has a brother whose kebab shop in Liverpool is doing well. And English! So much easier than this (as she points to my whiteboard of German grammar.)

I explained that my son has been in England for work. (Another word that hurts. How desperately these friends of mine want the right to work.) I didn’t mention of course that that work has been as a full-time volunteer for his faith – he’s been a Christian missionary — as any discussion about religion is strictly forbidden in camps. So I skirted that topic and flipped through a few pictures he’d sent that I’ve stored on my phone.

Sharing Photos, Seeing Contrast

Strangely, some of his shots are stored in between photos a Syrian refugee friend sent me of her fourteen-year-old son living in Istanbul. He’s been stuck there for nearly a year now, working slave labor to feed his father and two brothers who couldn’t get any farther on the exodus west. Their mother, by some border guard glitch, was able to go ahead with the youngest, who is eight. Both made it to Germany where they are living in a shelter.

I scrolled through the shots:

This son of mine is always smiling.

Hers looks bleak.

Mine is hardy, well-dressed.

Hers looks weakened, and the clothing is borrowed.

Mine has probably taken those mega-vitamins I sent him in that huge care package.

Hers is sallow, rail thin, eating rice cross legged on a bare floor.

Mine is lighthearted in every shot, sometimes playful.

Hers stands like a war prisoner.

This one is taken of mine in a shiny, bright apartment. Everything looks bathed in light.

Hers is a grainy shot of a grayed space where her son stands listlessly against a shadowed wall.

Mine is always in the company of other smiling, well-fed, well-dressed, vitamin-taking, lighthearted, light-bathed young people.

Hers is the portrait of The Terrified, The Mournful, The Stalked.

The Separated Among the Separated.

What Separation from Family Can Look Like

And what no one sees in any of these shots, what lies outside of the frame, but struck me with sudden and brass knuckle force, is that I have never seriously, frantically feared for my son’s life, my sons’ lives. Though separated from me, half my family has not been in peril. None of mine have lacked for food, shelter, clothing. And none have been living in the very city where the violence of a recent attempted coup left scores of people dead in the streets.

I scrolled, showing these refugees, all of whom are separated from family, my son from whom I’ve been separated, the son with whom I’ll be reunited in just a few hours. He will land on a jet plane. I will be on my toes at the arrivals gate. I will strain at every blond head coming my direction. My heart will thud, my palms will sweat, my voice will jitter, my eyes will tear up. And then I will see his face, his dimples, his smile, his whole healthy self. And I will run, arms flung wide.

When my friends will be able to do the same, none of us can guess.

That is part of the separation in humanity’s different separations. I’ve never had to weigh the possibility that a two-year separation could have easily turned into several years of separation, or even the ultimate separation of death. I have lived buffered from a whole other world of separation. Separated from it.

They looked at these pictures. I could not read their thoughts exactly, but the weight of their thought bubbles ––the ones filled with loving memories of togetherness and the stinging, exquisite hunger to be united with beloveds in one safe place –– crowded the air around us. If I was quiet and receptive, I sensed how those thoughts pressed us together, bending us toward that common plane where we are all most vulnerable, most fierce: along our family lines. Thin lines made thick through separation.

With new eyes I return to teaching German grammar to refugees. And they, in turn, keep teaching everything else to me.

My alma mater, Brigham Young University, solicited a piece from me for their alumni magazine in which I was to describe the nature of volunteer refugee work in central Germany. I suggested to them this piece, from right here on the blog, and they agreed.

When BYU Magazine agrees, brace. They hold nothing back.

They turned my homey post into a visually striking work of top notch journalism. I could not be more pleased. Thank you so much Peter Gardner and Curtis Isaak, for your excellent editing and lay out.

What pleases me the most about this, is that there is interest for such a piece, and although the typical nano-length of the news cycle is over, the interest in the story (which is really just starting) seems to be increasing. People are looking to get behind the thick, gray wall of what is typically portrayed in national media. I think we are weary from (and wary about) the angles being propped up, which might not be entirely representative of the day-to-day, on-the-ground story. Maybe you, too, want to read more personal, intimate stories like the one BYU published. If you are, it makes me hopeful. And it drives my writing.

Every day, I field messages sent from readers of my posts on my social media platforms (Instagram, FB, Twitter), who thank me for pulling back the curtain to an otherwise shrouded reality for them. I might grow obnoxious, posting every day (and sometimes more than once a day) on the stories that are changing my own life story. But you’re not hearing me apologize. These stories must be told.

The volunteers with whom I work know that the “refugee crisis” is a distinctly human and personal saga. It’s the story of Ahmad, Amina, Aeham, Mohammad, Ehsan, Akbar, Nada, Yalda, Fatema, Elias, Maiwand, Mahida. It’s the tragic/heroic tale of fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, engineering students and artisans, concert pianists and cobblers, farmers, physicians, Yazidis, Muslims, and yes, some Christians.

We know that, if history is told only in the abstract — with euphemisms, sterile headlines, and nameless numbers — then we will remain insulated. Unmoved like that, we will not engage. Unengaged, everyone loses.

All this is the impetus behind our non-profit, Their Story is Our Story: Giving Voice to Refugees (or TSOS). Led by my friend Trisha Leimer, and driven by Twila Bird, Elizabeth Benson Thayer, Lindsay Allen Silsby, Garret and Morgan Gibbons and myself, TSOS is busy at work, documenting the stories of the distressed, displaced, and often disoriented. We’ve been in camps in Greece. We’ve gathered in shelters in Germany. We’ve sat in parks and eaten kebabs and walked through forests, filmed hours and hours of footage, taken thousands of photographs, completed sketches and paintings, bent into one another’s arms in shared tears and are writing the stories. We hope you’ll follow our growth, await each story as we complete and share them, and learn along with us.

Final note: If you have specific questions you would like to ask regarding our non-profit, or the nature of refugee relief in general, or perhaps the journey of a refugee, please feel free to ask them here. If I can’t answer them, I have a global circle of informed volunteers, as well as an ever-growing community of refugee friends. They might be willing to write guests posts in response to your questions.

How do a hard-working, visionary refugee liaison, an award-winning videographer, an award-winning photographer, award-winning portrait painter, and an award-winning author who have never all met each other, (they live in four different time zones), find one another and combine their gifts to bless the displaced, distressed and desperate?

Divine choreography.

And what are the results?

A great deal of 3:00 a.m. cross-global texting. Plus some moments of humbled amazement.

Their Story is Our Story: Giving Voice to Refugees

The five of us involved in this project have watched as our connections––simply too far-flung to happen without reliable WIFI, and too far-fetched to happen without a steady dose of heavenly intervention –– have seemed to slide into place. Really, it’s been like liquid lightning. The electricity has flowed and flowed.

Trisha with Leyla, whose story, which we will soon share, will send thunder through your bones. She is a survivor multiple times over.

So let me first hand over the page to Trisha, my friend and inspiration in doing refugee work here in Germany. She can explain to you how Their Story is Our Story(TSOS) evolved.

And then I will share three brief refugee profiles with you. They are but a foretaste of what TSOS is about.

Finally, I’d like you to meet the team, including Garrett Gibbons, Elizabeth Benson Thayer, and Lindsay Allen Silsby, who in under five minutes will surely ignite a desire in you to lean in, step forward, and reach out with compassion to our refugee sisters and brothers.

Trisha recently wrote the following to her circle of friends who have been involved in refugee work here in Germany:

Some of you might be interested in a project that has fallen from the cosmos and into my life.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a dear American artist friend who used to live here in Frankfurt, and on the same day a message was forwarded to me from a complete stranger in London who does high-end portraits. Both of these women have been feeling strong impressions to put their talents to work for the refugees here in Europe. Meanwhile, I had been having strong impressions about putting together a media project to share these beautiful people and their incredible stories with others. I am certain this was not by chance that the Spirit was working on all of us at the same time…it is very simply Divine Choreography!

In the two weeks since then, things have just fallen into place. A group of five people with amazing gifts has formed and we are planning for them to travel from Seattle, Washington, northern Utah, and from London to sketch, photograph and film refugees here in the Frankfurt area and then, hopefully, in the camps in Greece. Some of the stories we hope to tell are people you may know. Adib and his son, Hasan. Tahmina, Daniel, Hangama and their family. Others we’ve grown so close to, whose stories inspire and

Our plan is to create first a video and then a book and eventually a traveling exhibit. We want to tell these stories and change hearts! I feel so strongly the hand of Diety in this project! As you each have felt, I feel the special attention our Father in Heaven is paying these people at this time. And I know that this project is His project.

Now, for three brief profiles of people who have become far more than “refugees” to us. In fact, we don’t like the word “refugee” very much, as it generalizes (and neutralizes) the poignancy and sacredness of each human story.

ADIB

Adib, a true gentleman.

Adib is a Palestinian Syrian from Damascus, whose thriving business as a master mason and ceramic tile layer was laid to rubble when war ravaged his world. With his son and business partner, Hasan, Adib made luxurious baths and kitchens in his home country, but most of them, like his own home, are now no more than a crater. Father and son made the perilous winter journey to Germany where both have been living for months in a tented barrack outside the town of Limburg. In spite of having lost virtually every material thing, Adib seems to maintain a perpetually sunny outlook. He is often found sitting with his head bent over his German lesson book, piecing together this new language the way he used to place tiles; meticulously, with patience, and always with the end result, integration, in mind. With these new reading glasses which he was given by a camp volunteer, Adib looks toward a bright and peaceful future.

VAHID

Elizabeth Benson Thayer’s sketch of Vahid

Vahid is Iranian, and arrived in Germany with the first wave of refugees in the early autumn of 2015. He was barely in his 20s. That journey meant leaving behind everything that was familiar and of value to him, including his home with his entire extended family and a mother he adores, his culture with its poetic language and fragrant food, his lifelong friends, and the plans they’d all made for the future. All this to launch into the complete unknown and in order to escape encroaching religious persecution and civil unrest. Vahid is a musician, and finds refuge in composing as well as singing while accompanying himself on a guitar. But you can’t easily make music in a cramped refugee camp. And of course among the few things he could carry over his shoulder, a guitar was not included. Already, he’s sung publicly in German, one of the many steps he’s taking toward integration in this new world.

TAHMINA

Daniel, Tahmina and Hangama Ahmadi

Tahmina is Afghani, the eldest of four siblings, and made it to Germany almost entirely by foot. Like her younger brother Daniel, who is a whizz at chess (and beats every last refugee camp volunteer who challenges him to a set), Tahmina is obviously bright and ambitious. Her English reflects a solid education and an eager mind. She hesitates to give too many details of the perilous trek from her homeland to Europe, (“So dangerous. So frightening. So sad,” she says), and doesn’t dwell on her innumerable losses. No stranger to hazard, Tahmina lived all her eighteen years with war and terror as a daily backdrop, since Afghanistan has been the stage for constant insurrections, coups, unrest, and destruction for 35 years. With Hangama, her younger sister, and Muri, her baby brother, she and her parents have one hope: to escape fear and live together in peace.

“Guten Tag,” I said, tipping my head toward the man sitting alone. One of the dozens I’d met while volunteering as a German teacher in refugee camps near Frankfurt, he had drawn my attention more than once.

Some of my students/friends at a previous refugee camp.

Hard to miss: Shoulders nearly as broad as the end of the table at which we sat; Ring with blue stone on his left hand; Vividly colored mandalas he’d painted on art day; Fantastical flying stegosaurus he’d fashioned with felt tip markers. The steady, weighted gaze from under the brim of his baseball cap gave him the air of a once-imposing but now-cowering animal, bruised from serial blows.

His eyes had been watching, speaking while I worked. Two minutes earlier, a dozen or so children and I had been rowdily chant-singing “Kopf, Schulter, Knie, und Fuß”, our laughter spraying like lemon yellow microbursts into the slate gray camp atmosphere. But the kids had lost interest after an hour and had run off the instant there was a lull in the rhythm.

Only one child, Sultan, had stayed. Now he moved down the table, dragging a leftover piece of my big roll of work paper in front of him, and took his seat next to the man in the cap. The man placed his hand on the boy’s back, patting twice. It was then I saw these two had the same eyes; moss green, mournful.

“Guten Tag,” the man said to me, his smile lifting the corners of his mouth, but not the edges of his eyes, which were fixed and, though shining, heavy.

“Deutsch? Englisch?” I asked.

He raised his meaty fingers, making a pinch, “English. Little.” The man pointed to Sultan, “My son. He speaks little English. Also little German.”

A woman joined us, slipped in, silently, sat with hands folded. Veiled in soft gold and brown patterned cotton, maybe forty, she moved gracefully, cautiously into the chair between Sultan and his father. Affection and sorrow spread across three faces in front of me, with hers a rounded portrait of weathered beauty centered in clear, wise eyes.

Sultan, whose slick black hair had been trimmed recently, piped up, tipping his head to one side: “Mother, die Mutter,” then the other side, “Father, der Vater.” Then be busied himself, writing.

“Und woher kommen Sie?” I spoke directly to the father, asking where they were from, and launching an interview disguised as a German conversation lesson.

The mother understood nothing. Sultan whispered, translating. The father nodded, pointed to himself, his wife, his son. “We: Afghanistan.”

“Und was schreibst du, Sultan? What are you writing?” I asked.

“Family. Die Familie Khan. Meine Familie. ”

Always seeking common ground, I said, “I have a husband. We have four children.” And I scribbled our family and ages, pretending this once that my eldest child was still alive, so 27 years old.

“For fünf-und-zwanzig Jahren we’ve moved a lot, too.” I wrote that above our heads, then continued, listing the countries, nine in total.

It was the “too” that felt wrong, a barb in my throat. I suppose that in another setting full of folks for whom international travel and residency are givens, “moved a lot” might have drawn a line of connection. Someone might have said, “Oh, we loved Hong Kong, too,” or “Really? We were in Vienna for three years,” or, “Which arrondissement of Paris?”

But did our moves as corporate expatriates and the Khans’ flight as terror-driven refugees have anything in common? Anything except perhaps geographic displacement? Mine was a superficial, even ridiculous, comparison. So my voice cracked with unease, trailed off in apology.

Trying to recover, I looked into Shafeka’s eyes. “It has not always been … easy.” Sultan translated the words, and I hoped this woman would read the real story behind my eyes, the one I couldn’t quite splice into the narrative, the one explaining how we had buried our firstborn, our eldest son, during that ragged borderland of moving between countries. Instead of that, I said it was hard because, “Every time, you know, another new language.”

Language acquisition was an obvious point of contact. I listed my few tidy European tongues and what’s left of my dormant Mandarin. Ahmed’s brow stayed flat. He then asked me to spread out both my hands, palms up, as one-by-one he bent my fingers closed, ticking off his ten languages: Farsi, Turkman, Uzbek, Tajiki, Balochi, Ormuri, Pashto, Pashayi, Dari, Krygyz. I didn’t even recognize half of them. “And little English,” he shrugged.

Then four young women approached. I recognized two; Summiyya and Safia from previous interaction, and knew they spoke exceptional English and had refined, discreet manners. “My daughters,” Ahmed said. And I was not surprised.

From bottom left: Some of the Khan family: Ahmed, Shafeka (veiled), Summiyya (veiled) , a friend, Safia (veiled), another friend, myself, friend Samir in the blue hoodie, and Sultan in red stripes.

“Now you learn German together as a family,” I said, trying to cheer them on. “You must work hard. Moving and learning languages is hard.”

Those last words petered out into yet another pool of shame. Those words could not stand before this man’s face, this woman’s face, this son’s and these daughters’ faces with eyes that have seen “hard” and horrors my eyes have only read of.

Nothing about our experiences with “hard” was similar. I’d moved from comfort to comfort, willingly, eagerly, with every possible advantage, every conceivable yellow brick already patted into place along the road forward. Suitcases in the multiples. Air shipments. Sea shipments. Jet planes. Eye masks and earplugs while grumbling about economy legroom. Hotels. Taxis. Relocation services. Rental homes, per diem, restaurants, facile passport stamps, schools awaiting along with piano, drum, clarinet, flute, horseback riding lessons. Freedom behind me. Abundance around me. Safety ahead of me. All as far as my eyes could see.

Art work with one of the many children in Limburg.

In contrast, here are the scraps of the Khan family saga:

The Khans’ world has always been at war. For generations, in fact, Afghanistan has been the stage of end-to-end conflicts, coups, rebellions, reforms, radicalization, insurgencies, the widespread violence of mass bombings, and the personalized atrocity of public executions. Once part of the intellectual elite, Shafeka’s father, a brilliant aeronautics engineer, had been executed by the Taliban. She looked away as she spoke and Ahmed translated, both wincing while tears sprang then streamed freely.

With their family surrounded by mounting violence and constant fear, Ahmed and Shafeka knew fleeing was the only option to preserve their family. They fled leaving everything; relatives, friends, home, neighborhood, mother tongue, all that had been their history, everything they had planned for their future, including the antique business Ahmed had built up over two decades.

With their seven children, Ahmed and Shafeka traveled from central Afghanistan to central Germany (a distance of over 5000 kilometers or over 3000 miles.) That is roughly the distance from Oslo, Norway to the Italian island of Sicily. Or from London across the Atlantic to Boston. Or from New York City to Denver, Colorado, and back to New York City again. This odyssey, which they undertook during winter, took four months.

They began by looping southward to Pakistan but were detained there by police who forced them to return home. They fled again, this time through Iran, where they were detained again and sent home. Again they fled, though I don’t know exactly how or by what route in order to avoid police. This time instead of being sent home, guards shot Ahmed in the feet.

(I’ve heard of this tactic used by police/guards/ border control officers from more sources than Ahmed. Shooting anywhere in the legs doesn’t kill, so a guard cannot be seen as inhumane, and a war council couldn’t prosecute. From the hips down can be counted as a misfire. Still it stops literally in their tracks those who are fleeing, and it intimidates others.)

Safia and Summiyya added their memories: “There was no bath, no water.” “Tired, so tired and sometimes sick.” “Afraid, always afraid.” “Where to find food? Where to sleep?” “Which person to trust? How to stay warm?”

As Ahmed and his daughters recounted this, Sultan stopped writing and raised those sea green, radiant eyes, and Shafeka shut hers, shook her head now hanging low, pressing her crossed arms to her rib cage. Then everyone’s eyes met mine, as if saying, “This is our truth. We deny none of it. We are here only because we have survived.”

Serious artists.

Since the day they stepped off a train, (what Ahmed calls “so big luck” from the Austrian border to Frankfurt), they have all been here in Limburg –– or in Limbo, as I call it –– a refugee camp under a train overpass that shakes and shrieks like the bombs that fell back home. People, mostly strangers to one another, are waylaid in overcrowded, utilitarian spaces for months on end, not knowing when they will be moved to another camp, where that camp might be, or if they might be denied asylum altogether and be deported. That threat hangs perpetually in the air.

But back to Afghanistan? To Iran? Iraq? Syria? To hell? As bleak as life might sometimes feel in limbo, life in hell is worse. Ahmed schooled me, his eyes narrowing and darkening. “War was terrible, terrible. No words. Terrible.” And his eyes scanned the hall full of refugees around us, all people I’ve grown to know, many whom I consider my friends. “All. All have dead because war. These people,” he was pointing, “dead father, dead mother, dead brother, dead children.”

I know all of my losses combined cannot touch the edge of what Ahmed and Shafeka have known, but I offer my one truth. I share with them––though it is hard to speak the words and I speak only with great restraint––a short version of how we lost our son, the one who is not more than a stick figure on paper, the one I said was 27 but is forever 18. “I know the feeling of losing someone you love with your whole heart. I know that feeling.”

Then I quickly add, “But I do not know this,” and I write the words with a vengeance. “I know nothing about this.”

Our conversation ended there. The multipurpose hall had to be set up as a cafeteria. All of us ­–– Sultan, Safia, Summiyya, Shafeka, Ahmed the Afghani antique dealer, and their American German teacher –– had shared scraps of our stories. Those stories, I reflected as I packed up my belongings, are as far from each other as are our countries. A seemingly inestimable expanse between us.

Or is it so? Now we were here, we had connected. In Limburg. In limbo. Maybe somehow all stories connect if you follow them deeply and far enough. And it could be that it is our stories of loss that connect us all. Don’t we fuse where we have been shot through, whether in foot or in spirit? Don’t we bond on our broken edges?

And where do we sense these bonding stories more poignantly than face-to-face, eye-to-eye, spirit to spirit? How do we better understand? When do we truly see each other?

What I saw as I walked under the train overpass to my parked car was a bunch of refugees, maybe forty, milling about on the gravel, waiting for “Mittagessen,” lunchtime. Among them, I spotted an Afghani antique dealer, father of seven, husband to Shafeka, a survivor named Ahmed Khan. He stood there behind the chain link fence, and not far behind him stood a son named Sultan. Both had their hands in their pockets, Ahmed with his black cap , Sultan with black bangs, both with magnificent eyes.

Those eyes. Those storied eyes. I stopped, turned, looked longer, closer. The general became specific, the “bunch of refugees, maybe forty” became particularized, human. So many eyes. So many stories. Eyes glinting in early afternoon sunlight. Eyes blinking back a world of lived darkness. Eyes behind which the sacred and unspeakable are known and preserved. Eyes in front of which limbo either looms or opens up as a bright and promising horizon.

Since 2007, the year that forever split my life into Before and After, it’s been impossible for me to write a year-end summary. Here we are again, March, and I realize I’ve still not lined up year 2015 and given an accounting.

That’s partially because I fear provincialism. I fear losing sight, even for a moment, of the global context in which my private story plays out. I’ve become aware this year more than any other in my life of how tidy, how survivable, even how irrelevant my personal dramas are in light of the immense complexities rolling out across our global panorama, across huge swaths of humanity. And so anything I say about my life, I feel, has to be said with the big backdrop in mind.

But here, a quick and dirty recap of 2015. Consider it a preface to my next book.

Il Matrimonio (The Wedding)

In this post I announced that our Claire got engaged to be married to her amore, Alessandro. Their courtship had been unconventional; their engagement and wedding followed suit.

After a year of long-distance yearning and reams of letters in Italian while she was finishing her Uni studies in the US and he was finishing his full time service as a missionary for our church in southern Italy, the two were married in a big Italian farm wedding outside of Pavia, Italy. True to the Global Mom story line, it was a multicultural reunion around sumptuous tables (the food!!), with languages flying in as many directions as were friends, who came in from France, the US, all over Italy, and Singapore. I’m still verklempt as I reflect on everyone’s thereness, the way we actually pulled off an otherwise logistically impossible event.

Swiss Zeremonie

Following the civil wedding, we trundled to Switzerland to join closest friends in a small, intimate ceremony referred to in our religion as a temple sealing. In contrast to the party in Italy, this rite was simple, quiet, other-worldly. The couple dressed in head-to-toe white for the brief ceremony attended only by closest Italian friends of our faith, and were given profound promises regarding their future together, which we believe extends beyond death.

A horse farm reception followed later in Heber Valley, Utah, and we left immediately for a family honeymoon through southern Utah to the southern California coast.

British Mission

Missing from all these festivities was Parker, of course. That absence doesn’t get easier, but we’re growing in gratitude and perspective and capacity to love life though broken and limping. Our Dalton, too, was far away, because in August of 2015, upon our arrival in Frankfurt, he’d turned right around to fly to England to launch his 2-year full time mission for our church in South London. He’s now been serving for over 19 months.

He’s serving now in an area known as Little Nigeria, working on that accent. He’s never been happier and bemoans that the end is in sight, wishing he could extend his service by a month or two, but is scheduled to enter Uni only shortly after relinquishing his badge.

German Flood

Underneath (literally) the marriage, the ceremony, the mission, was The Flood. For nearly nine months, our home was an oceanscape and construction site after an external water distribution system went amok during our absence and…We returned to a bayou that sloshed over our shoes. The entire ground floor of the home had to be decimated, and after jackhammers and turbo ventilators, it became a bombed-out concrete carcass.

Then it flooded again. And again. Workers found leaks inside walls…More than a few times, I hid in my car during the day to escape the deafening noise, and otherwise played hostess to a total of 80+ construction and insurance folks tramping through my door. Month after month. After month.

Yes, we survived it. Just fine. And we were happy that everything was completed the week the newlyweds arrived to live with us for a year. They’re doing this to save money while taking college/grad school entrance exams, working multiple jobs, and applying through the Frankfurt consulate for a US Green Card for Alessandro.

American Visa

A major part of 2015 and now the prime focus of 2016 has been this US Visa for our Alessandro. For those of you out there who’ve ever navigated the bureaucracy, you have my reverence and respect. I hear you groaning and see you holding your shaking head in your hands right now. Thanks for commiserating.

Now try jumping those same multiple hoops in two foreign languages. Every interview (and form and phone call and interview and returned form and repeated phone call and follow-up interview) has had to be translated from English and Italian to German and back in reverse. In all of this, Claire and Alessandro have been good-natured and unflappable. They’re learning about patience, work, consistency, and faith.

As I type this, they are sitting in Frankfurt’s US consulate in their final, all-determining, face-to-face interview. Claire flies to the US next week for her final face-to-face law school interview, and Alessandro is finishing his college entrance essays for admission to a US Uni in the fall.

Syrian Exodus

And all this – floods, reconstruction, Visas, marriages, missions, work, everything – is tempered by the bigger context in which we live. Because while we’ve been marrying and missioning, while we’ve been bailing water and applying for universities, while we’ve been fighting for Visas and begging for work, Syria (and surrounding populations) have been under siege. In desperation, hundreds of thousands of the distressed and traumatized have spilled into Europe, bringing in their wake a humanitarian nightmare unknown in modern history.

Art work with one of the many children in Limburg.

Here’s where our quaint family summary connects to the Big Picture. If 2015 began with a house flood, it ended with a world flood. The inconvenience of a house under jackhammer reconstruction is practically charming compared with the real bombs obliterating Homs, Aleppo and Damascus. Multicultural marriages and missions have their challenges, but are infused with hope and celebration because we have freedom, assets, peace, abundance, and every possible advantage life can offer.

While helping Ale and Claire with their German residency, I’ve been sitting in government hallways, elbow to elbow with threadbare and disoriented refugees fresh from their harrowing journey, seeking asylum. While editing my daughter’s and son-in-law’s essays for US universities, I’ve also been sitting in Frankfurt’s University for Applied Sciences, helping my Iranian and Afghani refugee friends apply for courses in mechanical engineering and intensive German language instruction.

These friends figure among the dozens with whom I’ve been working in local refugee camps since the floodgates broke in the early fall of 2015, and Germany welcomed an unprecedented 1 mill+ refugees (mostly Syrian, but also Iranian, Iraqi, and Afghani) across its borders.

The statistics and complexity are beyond staggering. The human stories are heart- rending and breathtaking. Because this is such a proximate and personal reality for me, you should expect to see more of my posts (and all my other social media platforms) weighted with these stories.

As I see it, 2015 and 2016 is where not just my tidy little family tale, but world history splits: Before and After. The saga will not be the type we can share in a Year End Summary. It is destined to color the future of humanity, everywhere. And it might be where Global Mom and On Loss and Living Onward intersect, inviting both the next book of my career and a focused direction for the remaining chapters of my life.

We stand at the crux of history in the making. Under our feet, the ground is groaning, convulsing under the weight and roil of a crisis— or better yet, a quaking pileup of crises — unparalleled in recent history.

What is our moral responsibility? Should we aid the growing millions of our displaced and distressed brothers and sisters? If so, how? Who, as winter encases this saga in ice, should generate the needed human heat that could save the exiled? And how can we keep our and others’ hearts from freezing over with fear or suspicion, especially given the chaos, premeditated violence and sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany?

This is the introduction I wrote for my latest feature hot off the press at Inspirelle. I beg you, friends, click on those last underlined words to read every word and to leave some of your own words here in my comment box, or in Inspirelle’s comment thread. Or, ideally, in both places.

These are historic times we inhabit. Get involved.

December 23rd with Kayra (front left in black), visiting refugees at camp in Frankfurt